the fireworks problem

singaporeans are getting smarter, all flocking to the padang to watch fireworks!

anyhow, here are two baking semi-failures:

the first is a rosemary sourdough. after not making the nigella sourdough, nor using the starter, nor making bread for so long, i decided to just make one again. this time i added rosemary to the dough.
bubbly sponge. i decreased the water by a lot this time, given the past experiences. and this time i wanted to knead by hand. so, with less water, the dough came together much faster.
and it sure did. but all the time, the dough felt very dense and un-wet. this made it very easy to make a nice scoring. (which probably wasn't a good sign, but a good thing.)
it turned out that the bread was too salty, and the crumb too tight. there was simply too little water, and all along i thought the large amount of flour would still neutralise the salt. almost inedible. clearly, lack of practise makes utter imperfection.

seibu and i made the black-and-white banana loaf cake today. the recipe comes from jia en's dorie greenspan book, which is fast becoming my bedtime storybook.
mushy mushy bananas. somehow, the cake batter was very curdle-y. i don't know why, even at initial mixing stage it was like that, though the process was similar to other cakes i made. (and yet dorie still can predict that the batter will be curdled.)
and the most exciting part. after spooning the two coloured batters alternately, wiggle a blade through the batters, but not too much. in our two strokes, we somehow managed to create this swan-looking pattern!
the swan pattern didn't hold up in the end as the cake rose and split down the middle. still, the smell was so promising. but the cake couldn't cool in time, so we just gently slid it into a loaf tin and took it out. that's where the error began, i think.
i think packing it back into a semi-enclosed space while it was still hot caused a lot of moisture to go back into the cake, which made the centre mushy. fortunately, you could also say that mashed bananas make everything (overly) moist, as most banana breads are. and fortunately too, mushiness always seems to convince people of the banana element.